Tag: facebook

I’ve been blogging on this site for almost 20 years now, and over that time I’ve tried just about every platform, every option there is, and have ended up back where I started. Over the last few years I’ve let my blog sit on the wordpress.com “free” site, while I took a break for the most part, while I tried out and contributed to other sites like Medium and all those other free content based sites.

Blogging has changed so much over the last 20 years, but it is still alive and well, and makes up a good bit of the knowledge base of the internet. I like to think I had a small part in that back in the early 90’s when I posted my first pages on a site called Concentric.net, my url address at the time was http://www.concentric.net/~sfillmer but is long long gone (previously Nextlink Communications, Concentric Network Corporation and Allegiance Telecom, Inc. is now a telecommunications company owned by XO Holdings, Inc, which is now owned by Verizon).

I wrote a post about 6 years ago now called WORDPRESS SELF HOSTED VS WORDPRESS.COM HOSTED BLOG PROS CONS :: REVIEW which detailed out the difference between the .org and the free .com and while it’s been nice not having to worry about malware and other attacks, I’ve come full circle and determined that with anything “free” there is a cost. Don’t let the “free” sites fool you into thinking their platform is free. Everything always has a cost, there is always an exchange for the free. It could be privacy, rights to market your own content, creatives rights, somewhere there is a cost to you and a way the “free” platform makes their money (otherwise they wouldn’t exist unless they were some government funded platform or something and then you have a whole different kind of cost, just look at China’s biggest social media platform).

This is so obvious when it comes to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, and perhaps to a lessor extent WordPress.com, where anything you create on those platforms belongs to them. The exchange is you get to use a cool platform for free, and anything you contribute becomes part of their bottom line.

This is how the internet has worked for a long time now, and I know moving my site back to where I control my own data and content won’t change that, but at least I will have control of my own created content. So, it was messy, but I moved the DNS servers over, I deleted my mapping on wordpress.com, changed from an IP4 to an IP6 (my ISP has issues with this), and did the whole export/import thing. It’s still going to be a mess for a while, but I can now ftp into my own files, change them, alter them in any way I wish, market them, and screw them up.

After the news came out about Cambridge Analytica scandal this week it really made up my mind to take back over all my content and start having ftp access to my data once again. So thanks Facebook, thanks Cambridge Analytica, and while I can’t quit Facebook outright because of my job as Director of Communications, I can at least not give you every last bit of my data content.

Does this ultimately change anything for people to profit off others content, nope, but at least I have control of my own created content. I’m not sure what this means for this site. As blogging has changed over the last 20 years so have my interests and things I’d write about today aren’t the same as they were. In some ways my interests have grown, or outgrown some areas, and I love to test out that 10,000 hour rule and its validity with different things. Instead of focusing time and attention on the social media sites, I’m going to use that time to be here instead. I moved over here to create and be creative, to inspire and be inspired. Wherever that leads.

I remember landing in Amsterdam on October 5, 2011 after being in the air for almost 10 hours. I turned on my iPhone and AP news alerts started pinging my phone as happens when a “world event” takes place. I read through the Fox News, CNN, Sky News alerts and articles, and read through my Twitter and Facebook feeds. As we pulled up to the gate I had already received the text below from Deborah (yes I have all my text messages from years ago), a message received in my hand sitting on a runway in the Netherlands thousands of miles away from Auburn, Alabama.

As we pulled up to the gate I took the photo above of the Delta flight parked next to our gate, pulled it into my Camera+ app, put a boarder around it and posted it to Instagram. At this point I had already checked my email, responded to a few emails, and looked up our connecting flight information. All from a small piece of metal, glass, and plastic that didn’t exist a few years earlier.

This may sounds like a lot of poetic musings for a phone, but for some reason my mind wasn’t ready for this particular piece of news that morning, and it confused me. I was on my way to Africa, and the only reason I was going to have any personal connection with my wife halfway around the world was because Steve Jobs had decided he was going to invent and create what I was holding in my hand.

Here was a man who shared no convictions with my faith, a brilliant man who had no understanding beyond the pluralistic view of Christianity known for centuries mixed with his version of Buddhism. He just couldn’t go beyond his own understanding and even made this statement to Isaacson:

“The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t.”

Yet I still felt some connection, even if a minor one, with Jobs, sitting on a runway in Europe, as if the plane full of people melted away leaving me and my connection with Jobs sitting in my hand. He shared none of my beliefs, yet he changed the world, my world, and still does on a daily basis. After I got home from Africa I read, back to back, the biography on Steve Jobs and the biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Metaxas. What an amazing contrast of times and cultures, beliefs, and both had the ability to change the world. Ultimately in death, as we all will do some day, either looking to what lies ahead, one perhaps clinging to life here on earth, so did these two great men.

I boarded the plane to Africa, still thinking about Jobs’ fate and wrote this as we took off.

The biggest surprise to me so far [on this trip], was upon landing, finding out that Steve Jobs died. I was truly saddened to hear this. I know we are all temporary to this world, but this man, who for all accounts wasn’t a believer, changed the world. He forever changed the way the world communicates, how we are connected with each other, and the reason I can talk to Deborah from this plane in Europe while she is in Auburn.

He affected so many people through his innovations. How are we to greave his death? I’m saddened over his death as if he was someone I knew personally, and at the same time I really don’t know why either. Death seems so imminent for all of us, especially when you hear about Jobs dying at 59. I know why we die, the fall created this and Christ had to die for us, but it’s still so hard to understand. I didn’t even know Jobs, but I will miss him. The new iPhone announcement yesterday had people wanting to see Jobs at the event, people who never knew, other than God, that he would die the very next day. I pray for his soul.

I’m not even really sure why I write this today other than to acknowledge the gravity this one person had on our world. A person I vastly disagree with on almost all aspects of life, yet he was someone who had a positive impact on so many people.

Jobs once said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” which really became his whole life philosophy, and was carried on today by Tim Cook and Apple with the video on their front page and the letter below. What other for-profit company would take down their entire front page just to show a 2 minute tribute video. Simplicity and sophistication.

I know to non-bloggers, writing a blog post about blogging is a kin to photographers talking about equipment (which we love to do), but to the rest of the world, it’s… boring… that is unless you love photography, or in this case blogging. If you know WordPress, their mantra is Code is Poetry, and maybe that’s why I love their coding.

Funny thing is, I find more people interested in new theme designs than I find people interested in writing on their blogs so go figure. I really try not to change themes too often, and Google doesn’t like it all that much either, but this time my last highly customized premium them, called Portfolio by WordPress only lasted about 3-4 months (see scalability issue below).

It’s Not the Theme It’s the Content

I’m not really sure why this is, but it seems to be true, even though I refute the notion when asked. I hear it all the time… if I just had a new, fresh, nice looking, well designed, custom coded, update to my blog, I would write more. And every time I hear that, my response is always the same. If you don’t write on your blog when it’s ugly-ish your not going to write on your blog when it’s beautiful. The phrase amongst websites and blogs that “content is king” has been true for years, and will remain true for all foreseeable futures of Internet knowhow. There is just nothing that makes up for good content. If you doubt this, just check out three of the worst designed websites on the Internet; Craigslist, Drudge Report, and Reddit, who are also some of the highest traffic sites on the Internet.

Still, every time I update my theme (which I try not to do very often), I get reinvigorated and excited about my blog. I still think my advice holds true, forget your design and just start posting good content and the design will works it’s way in. If you are in the habit of producing high quality, consistent content already, a new theme will be even more invigorating.

The New Twenty Twelve WordPress Theme

Some of the most versatile website designs today are from WordPress. I have written on them many times before so I won’t repeat that here, but if you have that strong desire to change designs like you change Facebook profile pics, WordPress is for you, at least theme wise. For the first time, I have gone with a custom design of a default WordPress theme from the guys over at Automattic, called Twenty Twelve, so this them I used here is available to anyone with a WordPress blog.

My top priorities when it comes to design are readability, typography, clarity, customization, scalability to move from one design to another, and a design that will fade into the background allowing the images and writing to take over, and Twenty Twelve hit these requirements quite well. This new them has one thing my previous theme didn’t have, the ability to move on to the next theme. The greater the customization, the harder it is to move on to the next code.

Twenty Twelve, launched on August 28, 2012, this theme is now going to sit as the WordPress default theme, an update to their “Twenty something” series of themes. It uses a new typography from Google (Open Sans), which is one of the most readable sets they have produced. If you have a WordPress blog, check it out, but you might already be using the theme and just didn’t know it. Thanks for another great theme WordPress. In my relentless desire to find the cleanest, minimalist theme design, you have brought me one step closer to perfection, at least in my mind.

This Actually is My 20,000th Tweet

This post is actually going to mark my 20,000th tweet on Twitter since I joined back on November 1st, 2007. Over that period of 5 years I have tweeted approximately 10 times a day, from 3 different countries, on 3 different continents, posted approximately 1,000 original images, and 1,000 original blog posts, while following around 1,000 unique very specific individuals. In honor of this pointless historical marker I have published my next list, 50 Reasons Why I Still Love Twitter, and give you 5 examples of what makes up my favorite tweets below. By the way, the Twitter favorites (star) is the greatest ever feature of twitter, and you can even create your own rss feed for your favorites list.

Twitter as an Essential Tool

Twitter has become an essential tool of our culture, and that’s where Twitter gets it’s power, it’s a tool, and a useful one. My very first post about Twitter on my blog back in 2008 asked just that question, Is Twitter Really a Useful Tool for Your Business? While that post is now far outdated, at the time, I really didn’t know the answer to that question. Back then people would tell me I don’t want to know what you are having for lunch, but now Twitter can facilitate changes to governments like we saw in Egypt and elsewhere, it’s gone beyond expectations. Many still choose to ignore it’s significance, but the power of Twitter has an almost undeniable usefulness the world has never seen.

What Makes a Great Tweet

So what makes a great tweet? Harvard Business Review did this study on just that very subject, and provided their results in this superb graphic shown above on what makes a great tweet and what makes the worst tweet. Overall, their conclusions seem to be spot on, but it can also be summed up in saying the overall best tweet is one that leads to something else. It provides some useful piece of information, or some unique insight such as this post I came across yesterday, What Would Peter Tweet?, and then leads the reader to take some action. So here are five descriptions that makes an overall great tweet.

One that calls you to an action of some kindThis can be anything from going to buy a pair of shoes from Toms because they do good things to doing the mundane

A tweet that sends you to something bigger than the tweet itself
Many times this can be as simple as providing a link to a book that the majority of your readers may not be familiar with, often this is a link to a news article or a blog post that will send the reader off to another site other than twitter

A message that gives the reader some unique insight into your own personal life
Too many tweets are party line tweets, whatever that party line is for you. It could be theology, it could be politics, or just pick something, but this is meaningless without being able to get to know the writer. All business and no play makes for a boring repetitive tweets.

One that asks a question of the reader
It doesn’t have to be a hard question, it just needs to invoke a response from the reader. This can be totally overdone, but this creates interaction, and that creates community, and Twitter is a community of followers and followees.

One that shares a general piece of knowledge or information
This is the biggie for me. There is so much noise on the internet and in the world today. Provide me with some useful knowledge about my faith, about the world we live in, about how other people live, about different unfamiliar communities. Twitter’s greatest power comes from its free flow sharing of information and knowledge, and this is the great advantage to society as a whole.

The worst tweets, totally not worth reading, are those that are complaining about something else or someone else. I personally can’t stand reading tweets from my followers who only say what’s wrong with this person or that (even if that actually is the case), and I will often quickly unfollow that user. Give us some insight into your life, in a positive way, and send us on our way better than when we came.

Those are just a few examples of great tweets from my most recent favorites list, and there you have it. My 20,000th tweet 740 words instead of 140 characters. Coincidentally, much of what makes a great tweet also makes a great blog post as well, but that’s for another day.

I decided to start a series of sorts on social media and how we the people of the church body use, don’t use, or outright diss the majority of the world at this point. I’m hereafter coining this series of sorts as the SMFT (Social Media, Facebook, and Twitter) discussion. Part of the necessity of this discussion comes after reading some of Viral: How Social Networking Is Poised to Ignite Revival by Leonard Sweet (or @lensweet), which I would highly recommend to anyone, but should almost be required reading for anyone born prior to 1985. I have written on this many times before, but I do so now mainly because there are still some in the church today who continue ignore this medium, which has now become the most powerful tool in the world to connect with other people.

Much of the premise behind Viral is to bring the older generations of believers (that is those born prior to about 1985) into the fold of understanding in the world we live in today. It is far easier to say “I’m not part of the world, the culture, the depravity of our society,” and ignore everything our world has become, even though we do still live in the world. We are supposed to be the salt and light to the world, not to be just the salt and light to the baby boomers. Many of us do ignore the power of social media in our calling as Christians to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20).

How in the world can we make disciples if we don’t know and understand the different forms of social media like Facebook and Twitter? So you say I’m on Facebook, got that covered… well, I would say Facebook is the most closed, the least evangelically available social media tool there is. You can close yourself off in Facebook by locking every aspect of your Facebook account and never be heard from again, what type of witness is that? Did you know that most younger generations are moving away from Facebook at this point (partly because we are now on there). It’s extremely important to get beyond Facebook and into other areas like Instagr.am, Pinterest, Foursquare, Flickr, Spotify, YouVersion, Kindle Books (yes it’s social), blogging, texting, and various avenues on Twitter.

[On a side note… if you are only on Facebook, you are not a part of the social media revolution, this is basically pseudo social networking at best. I say this because Facebook is close to reaching saturation levels. Facebook has become like the telephone or cable TV of the 80’s. Once everyone is on there who wants to be on there it’s growth is all but flatlined. I don’t mean if you aren’t on there yet, you shouldn’t get on there, and fast, but If you are only willing to get into one single social site, I would not recommend it be Facebook, I would first make it a smart phone, where you can learn how to access everything the world now takes for granted.]

So, if you are a believer, and think this social media thing is going to go away, I’m sorry, it’s only going to get more and more ingrained into the very fabric of the world we live in. In another 5-10 years it will encompass the world’s population, except for those who ignore it’s existence. For us the church to ignore social media is akin to the church ignoring electrical power and the car when they were invented, choosing instead to stick with candles and horses.

10 Reasons To Learn Social Media if You Are a Christian

Jesus would have used this media (this is a later post, but I will show from Scripture why this is the case)

We are called to disciple the world, and the world is connected via social media

If you don’t learn the basics, instead of you teaching your kids, your kids will be teaching you at some point

By the time you are ready it will be too late (it’s already quite late as it is)

Your target audience are all sitting right there waiting for your witness

How many people in your neighborhood have your talked to (witnessed to) lately?

Door to door is dead. Buried… and greatly frowned upon in our society. Social networking is the norm.

The disciples used every tool to their advantage (they wrote books and distributed them)

The Bible is the greatest social media tool every created, it’s meant to be socially shared

Because there are lost people who do not know Jesus and you may be their only connection

So there you have it. That’s just a start. I didn’t put a lot of references, or other specifics as to where my ideas came from, I will put those in future SMFT posts, and those 10 reasons are just off the top of my head, I’m sure there are a ton more. I beg the church body to not let itself become irrelevant in such an overwhelming way as to not be able to reach our world today. We make disciples by investing in people’s lives, and more than any other time in the history of the world, we have access to more people, to discuss the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ with more people, than any generation who ever lived before us.

First of all, I’ll say right off, I’m not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but sometimes I do it just to organize things out in my own mind as well, that’s what this is then. I hear it all the time, if I get a better, newer, and more fresh looking design, I’ll blog more, but that rarely happens. It’s like waiting to do something until the circumstances are just right in your mind, and often times, they never will be. That said, I do think there is a hint of truth to those statements, so over the weekend, after (literally) years of searching, I found one of my favorite customizable WordPress.com designs called Portfolio. So I wanted to make three quick points below today about my world of blogging.

A Little About the Versatility of WordPress as a Platform

WordPress is such an extremely versatile platform. Over the course of 10+ years now, this site has developed into far more than a blog to me, and much of that has to do with the ability that WordPress.com and WordPress.org (there is a difference, see also WordPress Self Hosted vs WordPress.com Hosted Blog Pros Cons :: Review), gives its users. As I have said many times over the years, your blog can be far more than just a place to type a few sentences, you can do that on Facebook. I really have such a narrow view on digital world design and organization, much of which I actually owe to my son and his design abilities, that nothing really ever quite fit my perfect balance of minimalist design, good typography, ability to showcase photography and writing, and so on, but this finally comes close.

A Little About Blog Purpose and Site Organization

Over time, I have begun to heavily filter what I placed on my blog, and what I write on my blog, much to my own dismay. To keep this creative avenue alive in my mind, I actually went to a few anonymous blogs, which as of now, I have combined and imported into this blog, with the intention of continuing those posts alive over here, even if they are trivial, unpolished thought, or just a photo with some comments. These other two sites were specifically for unpolished writing and photos. The writing site was writing only, no photos, and was called Religitic Writing at Religitic.com, which can now be found here under the Religitic tag. The other was photos with only a caption, or a short story, and those are now located in my Gallery and Stories section.

With this new design, I have created a front “home page,” which is a landing page for some featured posts. The rest should be self explanatory by following the menu at the top, but I have a “blog” link now that takes you to the chronological list of posts on my site. I redesigned and updated the About Page and some other organizational things, which hopefully will make navigation cleaner.

A Little About My Intentions Moving Ahead

Throughout the time I have spent on my site I have tried to keep a consistent collection of content, or to remain true to my personal mission statement if you like, and my focus will continue to be for that end. I started this overhaul to my blog earlier in the year (sorry to my RSS readers who are constantly being bombarded with old post updates), and I now see it will probably take the rest of the year to complete. Because content is king, and always has been, that will be the other focus on the future of this site. This means I really hope to continue posting new stories, gallery items, and text only content on various topics that are a little less filtered.

I recently told someone that they really can’t personally create a blog or website anymore where the content was duplicated in another place, or worse yet, just repeat and repeat the same message yourself. So if you can’t be successful in creating content someone else hasn’t already created how can you create anything unique? The answer if you. You are the only you God created, and you are unique in the entire universe. So the only content that is truly unique, is content of your very own, content from your own life, your learning, and of course your own experiences (because they are always different than someone else). And that is what I intend to continue to do here on this site. Create unique original content from what I call life.

If you have a blog, send it my way, I love to read blogs that are personal, unique, and provide some type of value to the world by self expression in life.

How much do we write that has meaning and longevity today? While we aren’t, and can’t, all be Mark Zuckerberg (see Mark Zuckerberg and the Biblical Meaning of Success), it got me thinking about the value (and noise) we add when it comes to our photos, videos, and our writing today. Much like photography when the digital camera boom happened, there was a flood of “uncle Bob” photographers that rushed on the scene, flooding every corner of the Internet with second rate photos. Now 10 years later, photographers, pros and amateurs alike, are adding a staggering 200 million photos to Facebook PER DAY, or around 6 billion per month, and that’s just Facebook, Flickr from February and March 2012, has reached the pace of 1.8 million photos a day, that is up to 28 photos per second in peak times. Same goes with video, YouTube is now receiving 72 hours of video uploads per MINUTE, and I’m sure the same goes with the music industry.

So what about writing? WordPress (the blogging platform of choice for many writers and bloggers, added 937,374 new posts, 1,492,356 comments, & 197,044,567 words TODAY on WordPress.com, which doesn’t even include self-hosted WordPress blogs making that number about double. When you add Twitter in at something in the range of 300-350 million tweets per day, you really start to see the massive amount of data we put out each day. Perhaps volume of information written degrades the overall quality of our writing? Would someone who wrote in the 15-17th century have actually had an advantage to writing in the 21st century? Less noise, less Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, Instagr.am-ing, etc, would probably have given Calvin or Luther more time to write, and write well, right?

This morning I received a notification from the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale that Wipf & Stock Publication has released previously unpublished writings of a series of sermons preached by Jonathan Edwards between 1737-1738. Here is a man who wrote profusely when it couldn’t be done on a computer. He had to write by hand, and even at that often times he didn’t have paper and had to use any scrap he could locate. In fact, he wrote so much that a whole team and museum of people are still sifting through his writings, trying to compile them into volumes. I wonder how much he could have written in the 21st century world. Maybe it would have been less… and not nearly as inspired as it was?

There was some great news from Google this week concerning cloud storage, and while it isn’t up to what I want in replacing your hard drive, Google Drive is a great step forward in drive cloud storage with 5GB free, and apparently I’m grandfathered in to my 20GB $5/year plan (see screenshot below). Finally Google put some effort into developing something we can truly use instead of trying to beat Facebook or Twitter at social networking. Eventually, this type of storage is going to do away with our need to keep purchasing more and more hard drives to store our files with only a small flash drive needed on the system for the OS. I have almost 8TB’s of data stored on local hard drives at this point, so this lousy 5GB of storage won’t help that, but it’s a start.

If you aren’t familiar with using cloud storage, until now, there was really only one real option, and that was Dropbox. Yes there are those like Box.com and Amazon Cloud Drive (provide 5 GB), and Microsoft’s SkyDrive (offers 25 GB) who just made some nice improvements this week, probably in anticipation of the release of Google Drive. Each of those have some significant disadvantages, and I don’t ever really consider them to be viable options because of their limitations or issues. Apple’s iCloud is great for backing up devices, but it doesn’t even offer an option for drive storage in the cloud. While I love Dropbox, the basic computer user still isn’t really familiar with Dropbox, and they are with Google. That doesn’t make Google better than Dropbox, but it does make Google Drive easier to integrate with your friends or family to share files. So which one is better, Google Drive or Dropbox? There services seem to be almost identical, but Google has some significant advantages over Dropbox.

The biggest news, at least to me, about the Google Drive launch in the fact that they are going to allow you to keep up to 100GB of data stored for a reasonable price of $5.99, it’s just too bad once you get above that, it’s outrageous, but that too will change. This is great on multiple levels, and something probably only Google could do with some massive data centers that companies like Dropbox, and perhaps even Microsoft, just don’t have. When you are looking at possible server farm potential for cloud storage, the biggest possibilities right now are Google, Amazon, and of course Apple who just built a massive cloud server farm in North Carolina, which is even visible from space now. All of this is good for those who want all files stored in the cloud instead of on local home hard drives that fail.

Advantages and Disadvantages in Google Drive vs Dropbox

More storage – 5GB of Storage on Google compared to 2GB on Dropbox (you can gain more on Dropbox)

Blanket Existing Coverage – most of us already use Google for just about everything from email to Internet searches

Google Recognition – sometimes this is negative, but in this case, everyone has heard of Google, tech-nerds know Dropbox

Integration and Development in OS – both have ability to run within MAC OS-X or Windows but Google has greater development potential. The biggest plus here is with Google Docs and other Google products.

Automatic Syncing – both have this as well, that’s the point of cloud storage

Works with iOS and Android – both have this too (Google Drive says coming soon on iOS), but the Dropbox versions could use some better features, hopefully Google will do this

Backup – this is a big question for me, what happens with my account and my files if the company goes Chapter 11. Google has less chance to do this.

Potential Increases in Storage – Google is known for increasing storage size constantly, and to me, the more storage the better

Integration with Google Apps – Not sure how soon this is on their radar, but at work we use a Google App account

No URL Links – Dropbox just released this feature this week, a feature that lets you have a unique URL for each file. I see no mention about this in the Google Drive information but it has to be in the works, they couldn’t have just overlooked this feature. For now, I only see this available on Dropbox.

For now we all have to wait until Google actually rolls it out instead of just giving us the information, and of course, they developed the Android OS before the iOS, so us Apple iPhone and iPad users will have to wait even longer. Still, it’s a step in the right cloud storage direction!

Artificial as this milestone may be, this is actually my 1,000th blog post on this blog! I set a goal a few years ago on My List that I wanted to post 1,000 blog posts, and after about 10 years of blogging, I have hit that with this post. When I think about 1,000 blog posts, it really doesn’t seem like that many, but if you do one blog post a day, never missing a day, it would take 3 years to create that many articles. Since I rarely ever posted every single day, it took me about 10 years to produce 1,000 blog posts, most of which came within the last 4-5 years. I’m pleased to have stuck with it this long, and I’m still learning more and more about blogging, writing, and the topics posted here every day.

Since I’m a numbers kind of thinker it is amazing to see what kind of history you can build when you consistently post over an extended period of time. [On a side note: in actuality this works with just about anything in life that you consistently, and continuously work at over an extended period of time. Anything from the compounding of interest in saving money to a consistent walk with Christ, growing in faith little by little, builds up piece by piece to collectively make something far larger than the size of its pieces. The problem with that, and the great challenge to us today in our immediate satisfaction culture, is that it takes time to build something of value, and we don’t want to take the time, or invest the time, to accomplish this. It can’t be done overnight or immediately, it is only achieved through building up over an extended period of time.]

So over time, within the 1,000 blog posts, there was over 1 million spam messages blocked, almost 500,000 words written, over 397,200 individual click-throughs using 3,197 tags, and 2,731 comments made. The busiest day over the past 10 years was October 11th, 2011 when I posted The Challenge of Being Salt and Light in the Darkness from one of the toughest days in Uganda, and the most viewed post ever over the 1,000 posts was (and still is) a review on a damaged kindle screenI wrote years ago. The most commented and heated conversations on this blog came from, what I thought at the time was a rather mild posting of the lyrics to U2’s Hawkmoon, Jesus, I need Your Love, Hawkmoon, which launched into a debate about God, atheism, and homosexuality, which really had nothing to do with the original post in the first place.

With all that said, I would love to know which category is your favorite between the 4 plus 1 of Faith, Photography, Journal, Tech, and then Sidenotes. Just from the traffic I pretty much understand which category the most viewed, but I am always trying to learn more about my beloved blog readers, so I would love for you to chose your favorite category from the poll below.

Even though I have been blogging for 10 years, I am still continually trying to learn how to create the best unique, genuine, and fresh spot on the web I can from my own personal experiences. Thanks to my readers, and everyone who has encouraged me along the way, I put on this shirt today just for you!

The day has finally arrived and today as our team heads for the Atlanta airport, and I know we all have prepared and prayed as much as is possible for this moment. In a few hours we will be over the Atlantic, at which time comes my very favorite feeling of all, having no control of driving the bus whatsoever by sitting in a medal tube at 40,000 feet for the next 2 days. Of course I did contemplate with Deborah for a short time about taking a slow boat to Africa but she reminded me we wouldn’t make it back before 2012 was here, so I guess it’s for the best we have planes now, I guess.

In case you missed my last trip from a few months ago (just hit Uganda on my blog and scroll down), we travel from Atlanta to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Rwanda, then on to Uganda (yes, we fly right over Uganda to land in Rwanda), for a total of almost 10,000 miles in just about 36 hours from start to finish. I timed my trip last time from the moment I left my house to the moment I got into the guest house and it was right at 36 hours, which translated into 1 sunrise and 2 sunsets. By the time we landed last time I remember thinking, this has to be Africa, if we traveled any farther we would start to head back home around the other side.

For those few of you who might want to follow a more exact detail of what’s going on as we board and land etc, you can follow my feed on Twitter @scottfillmer or you can friend me on Facebook. For those who are unfamiliar with Twitter, You do NOT have to be a member of Twitter to follow our trip/team on Twitter, it is an open page, just click on my name above and it will give show you the updates (if you want to respond to something on there you do need to join Twitter if you haven’t already). For Facebook of course you will need to be on Facebook. The information and photos I post on Twitter and Facebook are unique to those two media’s so you won’t see those pics on my blog. I will also be able to update both while I’m actually on the ground in Uganda during the day, so if you are so inclined you can read what we are doing over there as well.

For now, I would like you to meet our team. From the photo above (in no particular order here) we have April Olive, Amy Frye, Bart Hyche, Emile Ewing, Jamie Moussirou, John Dow, Lisa Randall, Prabhakar Clement, and me, Scott Fillmer. Please be praying for each of us through the stresses of travel, and being away from our loved ones, that God will give us the strength needed to make a difference in just the way he has called us to do. See you here when we get to Europe if I can.

Know that we all greatly appreciate all your prayers as we leave and while we are over there. For those who have my cell phone number, please feel free to send text message to me while I’m over there, it’s like getting a letter from home, and I can receive unlimited text messages on my phone, just can’t send a large number. I probably will not reply, but I will receive your message.